A little perspective, please.

Here’s a thought experiment. Suppose I told you that you could build some new transit infrastructure, and it would quintuple the number of passengers along Vancouver’s and Richmond’s north-south axis in only a few years. That would be pretty damn amazing, wouldn’t it? Or at least, it seems that way to me.

Of course, that’s exactly what the Canada Line is projected to do. It’s going to take the number of passengers on the 98 B-line–around 18,000 passengers a day–and bump that up to 100,000 passengers a day. And it’s currently projected to do that by 2013.

So I have to admit I’m more than a little puzzled by the attitude, expressed in this Kelly Sinoski piece in the Sun, that it’s some horrifying embarrassment that the Canada Line is only going to have 100,00o passengers a day in 2013, and not 2010. Were the original projections about passengers a little optimistic? Sure. Is it still pretty damn amazing to quintuple the number of passengers on a route in three or four years? Yes!